Abstract [en]

The purpose of this paper is to examine the prevalence of non-Western authorships in textbooks for Swedish at upper secondary school. The study is an educational text analysis, which is a form of content analysis. Four textbooks intended for the Swedish subject in upper secondary school have been analyzed by an educational text analysis of both quantitative and qualitative elements. Thesis theoretical base has been primarily Edward Said´s postcolonial theory and Mekkonen Tesfahuneys thoughts about a Eurocentric education system. The importance of an ethnographic approach in schools is also part of the theory. The result shows that non-Western authorships are given diverse space in the different textbooks. In the textbook with the highest proportion of non-Western writers, these are 22 percent of the total proportion authorship, while the corresponding proportion of the textbook with the least representation is 2,5 percent. The didactic starting points for how non-Western writers should be treated in teaching according to the textbooks also differ. Because of the big differences in terms of both content and didactic starting points in the various textbooks, the education in schools risk to not be equal, depending on the extent to which teachers using the textbooks in teaching.